We Can`t Douse Urban Fires With Dollar Bills

May 07, 1992|By Stephen Chapman.

In the wake of the unrest in Los Angeles, we have been reliably informed that the guilt lies not with the rioters but with the rest of us, who have callously ignored the plight of the poor and the cities and who must now make restitution by doing whatever is needed to repair the harm done by our miserly inattention.

People who have been pressing for years for an expansion of the Great Society now have one of the same excuses used for the original version, namely that it`s the only way to purchase urban peace. But if the government efforts of the last quarter-century haven`t insured domestic tranquility, what makes anyone think new ones will?

White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater was vilified this week for daring to question the liberal consensus and for suggesting that the disturbances grew out of the failed federal social policies of the past. You don`t have to be a member of the Bush administration to see some truth in that view.

Liberal sociologist Christopher Jencks of Northwestern University, in his recent book, ``Rethinking Social Policy,`` argues that federal programs have done a lot to reduce poverty. Still, he sees in them a serious flaw: ``No society can survive if it allows people to violate its rules with impunity on the grounds that `the system is at fault.` `` Says Jencks, ``The liberal coalition that dominated Washington from 1964 to 1980 . . . often rewarded folly and vice, and it never had enough confidence in its own norms of behavior to assert that those who violated those norms deserved whatever sorrows followed.``

Rewarding folly and vice has had predictable results. In the inner city, crime is worse today than before the War on Poverty; idleness is more common; family dissolution has become epidemic. In 1965, only 28 percent of black children were born into single-parent homes. By 1987, 62 percent were. In the typical poor urban neighborhood, it`s safe to assume the figure is above 80 percent.

If the expansion of the welfare state didn`t cause the pathologies that now plague the inner city, it certainly didn`t prevent them. That alone is a strong indictment. The point of the programs launched by Lyndon Johnson, after all, was not to keep things from getting worse but to make life better, especially for the poor. But in many important respects, the life of the poor is much worse today than it was in 1965.

This is not because Ronald Reagan and George Bush have practiced ``12 years of denial and neglect,`` as Bill Clinton argued in blaming the riots on the White House, or because Republicans have declared ``war against the poor`` and insisted on ``eviscerating social programs,`` as The New York Times declared. In fact, neither Reagan nor Bush did anything to dismantle the legacy of LBJ.

After adjustment for inflation, the budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development is the same this year as it was in 1981. In the 1980s, spending on federal programs for the poor (not including such middle-class entitlements as Social Security and Medicare) rose from $169 billion in today`s dollars to $225 billion-an increase of 33 percent. This is neglect?

During that period, Washington spent a total of $1.9 trillion to combat poverty. When you hear someone say we need a ``Marshall Plan`` for America, keep in mind that we`ve already got one. It hasn`t worked.

Clinton finds it ``amazing`` that the administration could blame urban ills on Democratic programs, when Republicans have occupied the White House for 20 of the last 24 years. He has somehow forgotten that Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress for all but six years since 1954-and that he and the rest of his party generally are happy to take credit for everything Washington has done to help the poor.

But despite federal social programs created in the 1960s and `70s at the behest of Democrats, and maintained or expanded in the `80s despite the enmity of Republicans, we have all the problems that afflicted the inner city a generation ago, only worse.

If we`re going to solve them, it will something more innovative than letting welfare advocates and urban mayors back a semi up to the federal Treasury. The best ideas are generally the cheapest-vouchers letting parents choose any public or private school for their kids, enterprise zones offering tax breaks to businesses moving into blighted areas, deploying more police in the highest-crime neighborhoods, enacting stricter rules to prevent long-term welfare dependency.

These ideas don`t require a lot of money, but they do demand imagination and resolve. The liberal reaction to the riots suggests that the situation is urgent enough to justify spending money, but not urgent enough to justify spending it differently.